Drive time: our lives behind the wheel

Journalist Tom Vanderbilt has made a career out of writing about topics from the mundane to the obscure, including sneakers, Quonset huts and nuclear fallout shelters. His writing is distinguished by its attention to detail, with exhaustive research used to explore every nuance of a given subject. Vanderbilt does just that in latest book, ...

Heavy reading

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day's horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley says during a call to her home outside of Monterey, California, where she has lived...